Marjorie Morningstar (99 page)

“Yes. Who is this?”

Her voice sounded exactly the same: sweet, a bit husky. I’d forgotten how low the
timbre was. Marjorie on the phone always gave almost a contralto effect, though you
didn’t notice it when you were with her. And there was the same slight hesitation
in her voice—what is it, precisely? A manner of speaking half a beat late, a touch
of shyness or something; anyway, it always seemed to me the essence of femininity,
and it was still there.

When I told her my name, and where I was calling from, the pause lasted more than
half a beat; two or three, maybe. Then, “Hello, Wally. It’s wonderful to hear from
you.” Not bursting with joy, not even particularly surprised; very warm and sweet.
Of course, I must come right over, she said; she’d be delighted to see me. Her daughter
would be especially thrilled to meet a playwright, because she was so wild about the
theatre.

Marsha drove me over in a yellow Cadillac a block long. We turned into the driveway
of this handsome old white house, with a glass-button sign on the fence at the entrance,
Schwartz
. A gray-headed lady was sitting on a flagstone terrace out front on a deck chair—one
of the grandmothers on a Sunday visit, I figured. We got out of the car and walked
to the terrace, and it was something of a shock when the gray-headed lady turned out
to be Marjorie. The fact is, she looks very much like Mrs. Milton Schwartz, and not
much like the Marjorie Morgenstern I last saw at a much too plush wedding at the Pierre,
a decade and a half ago.

Despite the gray hair (which is premature, she’s not quite forty) she remains an attractive
woman, slim, with a pleasant face and a sweet manner, and a sort of ghostly resemblance
to the Marjorie of yesteryear. She has a fourteen-year-old daughter, Deborah, who
looks more like the girl I knew than Mrs. Schwartz does. All that is to be expected,
I guess. It’s an unsettling thing, all the same, to see your first love a gray-headed
mother of four kids. I couldn’t help thinking how wise she had been to discourage
me in the old days. A man of thirty-nine is
not
well suited to a woman of forty. I’ve been through affairs and a divorce and I still
feel like a comparatively young man trying to settle down. She made a joke about her
gray hair, but there was no bitterness in it; a little wryness, maybe, but a contented
wryness, if that means anything.

Contented, she obviously is. There was no mistaking the look she gave her husband
when he came in with their two boys from a father-and-son softball game, in old clothes,
all sweaty and dirty; nor the real kiss, nor the way she rubbed her face for a second
against his shoulder. He’s a good-natured late-fortyish man, broad-shouldered, sort
of plump, grizzled hair going at the temples. He handled the situation very well,
if it was a situation, of finding me there with Marsha and Marjorie. After all, the
successful old beau showing up in the suburbs is a worn gambit for comedy. But Schwartz
was pleasant, even engaging; not a trace of self-conscious resentment, no snide remarks;
instead, a genuine invitation to hang around for highballs, and deferential compliments
about my plays. I didn’t see much of him because he showered and changed and went
off with the boys to their beach club to watch fireworks. The boys are standard-issue
boys, eleven and nine, I’d guess. Marjorie fussed over them before they went off to
the club, the way any mama should. She had to remain at home because the maid had
gone off unexpectedly, and they have an infant daughter. That was how I got to talk
to her a bit. I made several offers to leave (Mrs. Michaelson had gone earlier, much
to my relief, because she had guests coming for cocktails), but Marjorie insisted
that I stay. Later I found out why. I might have guessed. But like a fool I was flattered,
so I stayed.

We had several highballs. Maybe she wouldn’t have talked otherwise. She was very awkward
with me at first, though pleasant; seemed a bit awed. It turned out pretty interesting.
She had a little battle with the daughter about piano practice before fireworks, and
won it. The girl flung off inside and began thumping away. I was reminded forcibly
of the way Marjorie’s mother used to put her foot down in the old days; Marjorie has
much the same dry good-humored firmness.

We sat around out on the lawn on deck chairs, drinking, watching the sunset. She asked
me the usual questions about Broadway and Hollywood. But I must say she had no offensive
celebrity-worshipping eagerness, the toothy bug-eyed kind of thing, like Mrs. Michaelson.
I felt she wanted to know about me, and I answered frankly. Her comments were intelligent
and to the point, as they always used to be. She discussed my plays well, and pleased
me by praising
The Meadow Sweet
. I guess an author always has a weakness for his failures, but it’s quite true, as
she said, that that’s the only time I stepped outside mechanical farce and really
tried.

Just for the hell of it, I mentioned my encounter with Noel Airman in Hollywood. She
was interested, but in an absent way; she didn’t spark at all. If anything, she seemed
amused when I told her he was married to a fat German photographer who’s a fad with
the movie crowd. She said she’d met Mrs. Airman in Paris. When I told her Noel had
ended as a third-rate baldish television writer, with his wife more or less supporting
them both, she nodded. “Noel was never much of a writer, you know,” she said. “He
should have been a teacher, I think, or a lawyer. He had a good mind, and a vivid
way of putting things. But I guess he was too erratic for the academic life.”

I couldn’t help saying—I’ll admit it was small of me—”Time was when you thought Noel
was a pretty good writer, Margie.”

To my amazement she denied it. She said that from the beginning, at South Wind, she’d
insisted that I showed professional promise and that Noel was a mere dilettante. She
claimed she’d encouraged me to become a writer, all but discovered me. She became
a little annoyed when I mildly tried to disagree. There isn’t the slightest doubt
that she believed every word she said. She’s rewritten history in her mind, and now
she’s the one who always knew Walter Wronken had it in him. What would have been the
use of reminding her that she’d almost driven me wild once by suggesting that I study
Noel’s brilliant writing to improve my own? I get irritated now, twenty years afterward,
thinking of that moment. But it no longer exists for her, or indeed for anybody on
God’s whole earth except me—and only for me because I’m cursed with a writer’s memory.

I told her about my marriage and divorce. She had read, or heard, about my breakup
with Julia, and was pleasantly sympathetic. What with the highballs, and the clouds
all yellow and red in the setting sun, I waxed a little melancholy and philosophical
about the problems of being married to an actress. At one point I said, “This much
you can be sure of, you’re a hell of a lot happier than Marjorie Morningstar could
ever have been.” She turned and stared at me, and for a flash there was contact between
us. Just for an instant, the old Margie was there in the blue eyes of Mrs. Schwartz.
And she said, “Good God, do you remember that? You would. You and your steel-trap
mind. I don’t believe I’ve thought of that name in a dozen years…
Marjorie… Morningstar
…” There was something extremely poignant in the way she drew out the syllables, and
smiled. It was the old sweet, warm smile. That hasn’t changed.

She kept pouring the drinks. Her capacity is astonishing; it seemed to make no difference
whatever, except that she talked more easily. I had to beg off from a couple of refills,
because I was getting a little dizzy. The only time she did anything strange was when
her daughter started to play
Falling in Love with Love
in the house, not too well. She got up, highball in hand, and started to waltz. There
was something slightly bizarre about that, a gray-headed woman in a swirling blue
cotton dress, waltzing soundlessly by herself in the sunset, with her long evening
shadow gliding behind her on the lawn. The song reminds her, she said, of a man she
met on her trip to Europe, who was doing some kind of cloak-and-dagger work rescuing
Jews. Something came over her when she talked about him. Her voice began to sound
more like the voice I remembered (it was getting dark, too, and maybe that helped).
It lost some of its flatness, some of the authoritative parent sound. Also her daughter
came out about then, and got permission to go off to the fireworks, and Margie seemed
to relax when she was gone. She went on for quite a while about this man. I gathered
he meant a lot to her, even as a memory. Which was in itself interesting. My picture
had always been that Noel was the big love of her life, and I’d been quite sure I
knew everything about Marjorie Morgenstern up to the day she married (except whether
she ever actually had an affair with Noel—something I simply couldn’t believe then,
though I suppose now she did). But here obviously, in this man she met on the ship,
was a missing piece of the jigsaw, possibly even the key piece.

After that she told me about her brother Seth getting killed at Okinawa flying for
the Navy, and then about a baby boy of hers, the second, that had choked to death
in its crib at the age of two months, the doctors never figured out why. And about
her father going broke and having a heart attack, and her husband putting him back
on his feet at terrific cost, and about her mother-in-law being bedridden in her house
for four years, dying slowly of some blood disease. She was quite detached, not in
the least self-pitying about all this, even when she said at one point, “I’ve come
by these gray hairs honestly, you see.” It all added up to a lot of soap-opera afflictions,
I guess. I can see why those programs are popular. Childless people, people without
families like me, don’t know about such things, but the average housewife sees herself
being dramatized, I suppose. I began to be ashamed of having thought Marjorie dull
and boring at first. Yet she is dull, dull as she can be, by any technical standard.
You couldn’t write a play about her that would run a week, or a novel that would sell
a thousand copies. There’s no angle.

Out of all the talk about her troubles, we somehow got on the subject of religion.
She’s a regular synagogue goer, active in the Jewish organizations of the town; apparently
that takes up a lot of her time. Her husband is active too. They seem to be rather
strictly observant; Marjorie has separate milk and meat dishes in the kitchen, and
all that. I tried to pin her down on what she really believed (we’d had enough to
drink by then so that such a discussion wasn’t embarrassing). She was curiously evasive.
She said that the professors of comparative religion were like bright kids with clocks.
They could take a religion apart and show how it ticked, but they couldn’t put it
back together so it would work for anybody. I mildly suggested that the day was past,
maybe, when religion could work for any educated person. She flared a bit; said religion
still worked for a hell of a lot of people. She said her parents would never have
survived the death of Seth without it, and that she didn’t know whether she and Milton
could have stayed in one piece after the baby died if they hadn’t had their religion.
At this point I was probing, perhaps cruelly, to strike bottom. I said, “Well, Margie,
maybe that only proves the power of a dream.” Like a flash she answered—and her voice
sounded just as it did in the old days, full of life and sparkle, “Who isn’t dreaming,
Wally? You?”

The fireworks started around then, all green and golden and red, over the sound. We
stopped talking for a while and watched. It was quite a display, what with the clear
night, a crescent moon, and evidently a very large budget at the beach club for the
Fourth of July celebration. Rockets, Roman candles, and burst after burst of the showering
things, every color in the world, popping and banging every other second, and at the
last a super-special white one that seemed to fill the sky and make it bright as day.
Then it was dark, and there I was with my gray-headed old flame, both of us rather
high, and her family coming home. So I went inside and telephoned for a cab.

I said, while we sat around on her flagstone terrace waiting for the cab—figuring
that it was now or never to clear this little mystery—”Well, I hope you’ve acquired
some patience with your gray hairs. Fifteen years ago you stood me up on a date, just
because I was twelve minutes late. I think you owe me an explanation and an apology.
I never got either, you know.”

She looked blank, as I expected. I reminded her how she’d telephoned me, and was supposed
to meet me in the lobby of the St. Moritz and have lunch at Rumpelmayer’s. Remembrance
came over her face, with the old coquettish look, decidedly odd framed in gray hair,
and yet not unattractive. “Good God, what a memory, Wally. That all happened in another
century. As I recall, I thought you’d forgotten the date, that’s all. I suppose I
went out and had lunch at a drugstore.”

I told her how excited I’d been, how I’d changed my tie four times for this date of
dates, and finally rushed out to buy a new tie because I didn’t like any I tried on.
Her eyes became big and round, and a very strange smile hovered around her mouth.
“Ye gods, is
that
why you were late? You went out to buy a new tie?”

“Just to impress my lady fair,” I said. “I went out to buy a tie, Marjorie. Why did
you telephone me? Why did you want to have lunch with me?”

She laughed, a low peculiar laugh, looking slowly around at the house, the trees,
the lawn, the water, as though she were coming out of a trance. “Who knows, Wally?
It was fifteen years ago. Probably I wanted free tickets to your show for my folks,
or something.” I was leaning on the parapet, smoking. She got out of her chair, walked
over to me, and kissed me coolly on the mouth. “That’s for going out to buy a tie,
just to impress me, Wally. I’m sorry I stood you up. I can’t remember why, but I’m
sure it was very silly of me.” The voice was the voice of Marjorie Morgenstern, and
the kiss gave me a strange little thrill, remote as it was.